


Get Some Therapy

by JaneTheNya



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Deja Vu AU, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Potential spoilers for Deja Vu?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:15:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28066854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTheNya/pseuds/JaneTheNya
Summary: Another piece inspired by Daxiefraxie's Deja Vu AU. Several months after everything happens, Akechi takes the first step toward keeping a promise.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	Get Some Therapy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Daxiefraxie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daxiefraxie/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Deja Vu](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20826896) by [Daxiefraxie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daxiefraxie/pseuds/Daxiefraxie), [JaneTheNya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTheNya/pseuds/JaneTheNya). 



Akechi sat alone in the office’s waiting room, thumbing through the last few pages of the mystery novel he’d picked up a day earlier. With all the free time he suddenly found himself with, working through books in a matter of hours wasn’t uncommon. It was a way to distract himself from everything that had happened, to avoid thinking too much about himself.

This particular novel had bugged him, and it had taken him awhile to get a handle on the culprit. The author hadn’t made the killer’s motives clear until he was revealed. That was always how Akechi solved the plots of his mystery novels. There was a unique behavior to someone holding in a grudge, a bitterness. No matter how good their performance, there was always an element of truth in them, always moments where their true intentions snuck through with striking bile and hate.

Too many mystery novels had their heads up their protagonists’ asses. Spending all the time the book offered in the head of some charming, hyper-intelligent detective who could put pieces together at a moments’ notice. These characters were boring. What’s the use of having a goody-two-shoes with no flaws, no moments of doubt? It infuriated Akechi even more that, almost universally, these detectives had some slapdash, copy-and-paste sad backstory… a dead wife, a tough home life. Yet those experiences only seemed to give them resolve, turn them into a superhero. It never broke them, made them doubt themselves, made them sympathize with the killer. It never made them stay up at night gripping a knife and wavering as they danced with thoughts of surrender in the cruel game of reality they’d been given.

At last, the door at the far end of the room opened, and a young man entered with a clipboard, adjusting his glasses. “Alright, sorry about that, Akechi-kun.”

Akechi sighed, setting the book down. “Don’t be. I’ve got nothing but time these days, after all.”

This man was Takuto Marurki, a new counselor brought into Shujin Academy as a PR stunt by the faculty after the public nightmare that was Kamoshida’s confession and subsequent arrest. Maruki had been a hastily-prepared move to course-correct, one so half-hearted that they couldn’t even be bothered to seek out a counselor more experienced in the field. There was only one reason Akechi trusted the man, and that was his apparent success with Kasumi.

“Right. Well, as I’m sure you’ve been told, I normally don’t take patients who aren’t in the Shujin student body. But this was a special request.” He flipped a page, adjusting his stance slightly. His right hand shook a bit as it moved. Nerves? It wouldn’t be surprising, assuming he knew anything, but it was unlikely he did… why would Mitsuru or Naoto have told him? Would it have been Ren, after all?

“...Sorry. Did you get all that?” The man gave a patient smile, eyes shut. Akechi shook his head with a groan that became a growl. He rested his face in his hands, leaning over in his chair. He hadn’t been getting enough sleep.

“Sorry,” the man repeated. “Should have paced myself. Why don’t you come on in?” He stepped to one side, arm swaying out to let Akechi inside the small, cluttered office.

Akechi stood from the small bench he’d been sitting on, grabbing the dark tan jacket from next to him and slipping it on over his dark green sweater. “Lead the way,” he said, light in tone but clearly irritated, bothered. No way in hell was he going to step inside first. He was done falling into traps.

Maruki smiled, giving a nod, and stepped inside the office, Akechi following. It was messy, as expected. The cleanest area saw two couches across from each other, a small cooler in the center. The sight made him sick. He glanced around, boxes and files and books lining the shelves, a variety of knicknacks resting on his desk. Most of it made sense, different patients needed different stimuli to open up. It seemed personable, all these strange things lying around, but it wasn’t. Everything was cold, calculated, boiled down to a science. In one ear, out the other, cookie cutter responses and delivery. That was therapy.

He huffed as he took a seat on the couch nearest to the door, not waiting to be told. Maruki followed, taking a seat across from him at the table.

“Before we begin, can I offer you anything? Snacks, toys, puzzles, you name it, I’ve got it in here somewhere.” Maruki gave a chuckle.

“No,” Akechi said bluntly, removing his leather gloves and placing them in his left-hand pocket. He rolled up his right sleeve and checked his watch. Thirty minutes. He could handle that.

“Okay,” Maruki retrieved a clipboard from the glass table between them and began glancing over it. “First thing’s first. I want you to know that…”

Akechi rolled his eyes. “Anything I say is confidential unless I talk about planning a suicide attempt or, I don’t know, slitting someone’s throat. I get it.” Already the cold, bulleted nature of therapy was irritating him. Unfeeling, calculated, mechanical. Insincere to its core. His eyes drilled holes in Maruki.

The man ran a hand through his hair, and wrote something down. “Gotcha, gotcha.” He looked as though he was thinking, hesitating. After a moment, he leaned forward and took a juice box from the cooler on the table. “Want one?” he offered, a hand indicating to the cooler. “I can grab it for you, or you can.”

Akechi couldn’t help but give a little smile at that. That’s right, after all, this was Kasumi’s counselor. “I’m fine,” he replied coldly. Maruki nodded and closed the cooler, leaning back and poking the box with his straw.

“So, let’s start small. How are you doing today?” He asked, looking up and making eye contact with an earnest smile.

Akechi sighed. “Bad. Can we move on?”

Maruki seemed to consider that for a moment, twirling his pencil between his fingers. “Can you tell me what’s been bad about it?”

Akechi lifted a hand to his face, pulling away some of the hair from in front of his eyes. “I was sent to some therapist’s office and the first thing I encounter is a man maybe five years older than me sipping a juice box and acting all giddy to hear about my trauma, and I’m currently resisting the urge to knock his damn juice right out of his hand.” He grinned. “Oh, I’m sorry, does that count as threat of violence toward others?”

Maruki gave a chuckle, seemingly unbothered, and set the juice box down, writing something else on his clipboard. “Right, I see.” He was quiet for a moment, thinking again. “What was it about coming to therapy that upset you?”

Akechi sighed. “I don’t want to talk about every single obligation in my life that irritates me or we’d be here all day. Do you want to get to the juicy stuff or not?”

Maruki nodded. “Well, I’ll remind you, you don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to. If you want to skip the pleasantries, that’s perfectly fine.” He wrote something else down. “So, what did you come here wanting to talk about?”

Akechi folded his hands, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his lap.

“It has occurred to me,” he began, trying to choose his words carefully. “That my ability to form… meaningful relationships with others, to process my goals and actions, has been difficult. I have lived a life largely devoid of true connections with others, focused single-mindedly on a goal that is… now over.”

“Mhm,” the doctor said.

Akechi’s train of thought died, and he took a curt breath through his nose. “…fuck you. Don’t do that.”

“Oh, I’m sorry? Don’t do what?” Maruki looked taken aback, and leaned in to listen.

“The fucking… prying. The ‘mhm’. It’s an encourager to get more out of me. It makes you sound like a robot going through the motions.” Akechi crossed one leg over the other. “If you want my advice, drop all that. If you want me to believe you genuinely give a shit about me at all, act like a human being.”

Maruki smiled weakly. “You’re awfully astute.” Akechi scoffed. “To clarify, we counselors are trained to follow those motions because they’re effective. It may sound repetitive and cold to you, but it’s what’s been shown to be the most effective. It isn’t because I don’t care about you, directly the opposite, actually. That said, if you don’t like it, consider it dropped.” He smiled and took a sip from his juice box.

“How very benevolent of you,” Akechi replied, his tone dripping with sarcasm. He sighed, running a hand through his hair. Maruki waited patiently for him to continue.

“After everything happened, I’ve had a difficult path to traverse, to atone for my past misdeeds and to earn the trust of the people who care about me.” He sighed again, flinching subconsciously at his own words. “I don’t… intend to show my face in front of them until I’ve earned that trust.”

Maruki nodded, taking this down. “So… if I can assume here, and feel free to let me know if I’m off the mark, you want to better yourself and work on your problems so you can be a better friend to these people?”

Akechi was silent for a bit, sighing again, thinking, and then nodded. “I suppose that’s accurate.”

Maruki nodded. “I think that’s a pretty good idea, and pretty admirable. It’s easy to fall into being a toxic friend, and not many people take the initiative to avoid that.”

Akechi’s eyes narrowed. “Is a toxic friend, in your professional opinion, apt to describe a man who tried to kill his first true ally to appease his worst enemy? Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

Maruki nodded, considering that. “Let’s say, again hypothetically,” he grinned a bit at that, “that you’ve done every terrible thing in the book. That you’ve been exactly as bad a person as you tell yourself you are.” The doctor shook his head. “You are not your crimes, Akechi-kun. You may have done bad things, but they don’t define you. There’s more to you than that.”

Akechi’s left hand subconsciously gripped his right forearm, tight. Beneath the layers of his light jacket, sweater and button-up, his scars burned.

“Your friends want to remain friends with you after everything, right?” Maruki took a sip of his juice box. “So it’s safe to say that they agree, that there’s more to you than your past mistakes. Clearly there’s something about you they find worth caring about.”

“Pity,” Akechi spat. “It’s Ren’s miserable fucking savior complex, his need to save everyone.” The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop them. “He fucking pities me, get it? He thinks he needs to rescue me so he’ll even drag me back into a group of people I’ve hurt so he can feel like he did. That’s all.” He sighed, hands shaking, and wiped his eyes with his sleeve, now mysteriously watering. “I hate him for it,” he whispered, one last unavoidable escaping of words.

Maruki was silent for some time, taking that all in. He offered a tissue box on the table to Akechi, who rejected it with a shake of his head.

“I think,” Maruki began, slow and deliberate, picking his words carefully. “That your feelings are valid, those fears and that anger is valid. I also think it probably isn’t true, though. I think you’re telling yourself that, on some level, to justify why you don’t have to answer some of the feelings you have. If your friend, Ren, is just trying to pity you, just trying to feel like he saved you, it’s an easy reason why so many of your new friends would forgive you in spite of your past. It’s a safe answer you can tell yourself is true without having to reconcile everything.”

Maruki took another sip of his juice box. “I think you’ll find, ultimately, that they really do care about you, that they see you for more than your crimes, more than your past. The reason your friends want to be friends with you is… well, they like you. It can be as simple as that.” He smiled, making eye contact with the pale-faced puffy-eyed boy sitting across from him.

“Things are rarely so simple,” Akechi explained. “People always have an agenda. You expect me to believe Ren really IS the saint he purports to be?”

Maruki shook his head. “I don’t think it’s helpful to try and read Ren’s mind. You can’t know what he’s thinking, and neither can I. We can’t know what his reasons are, nor can we change them, but we can change our own minds, our own behavior, to be better. Does that make sense?”

Akechi sighed, frustrated. “Sure. Whatever.” Another hand through his messy hair. “Call it paranoia, but it’s hard to be confident that I’m unconditionally accepted by a bunch of people I’ve explicitly wronged.”

Maruki nodded. “I get that, I don’t think that’s unreasonable. But I think we all have our own reasons for things. If they want to be your friend, and you trust them, why not? It might be hard to accept that they can like you when you have such strong feelings about yourself, but it may also be true that there’s a lot about you to like. Things that you just can’t notice from your biased view of yourself. We’re all our own worst critics, after all.” And he smiled.

Akechi shifted, crossing his other leg over, silently and subtly changing his position as he thought.

“Something else on your mind?” Maruki offered.

Akechi sighed. “This won’t sound great,” he groaned.

“Why don’t you tell me anyway? I’ve heard quite a bit, even in my limited time in the field,” Maruki assured.

“…are you authorized to prescribe medication?” Akechi asked, his voice small and meek. He hated the way he sounded, left hand gripping his right arm.

Maruki nodded. “If, through our sessions, I determine medication might be helpful for you, then yes, I can.” He wrote something down quickly. “Why do you ask, do you think there’s something you need?”

Akechi sighed aggressively, almost doubling over. “I’ve tried to solve my own problems. You can try to solve them too, if you want. But I’ve concluded there are certain things I can’t get past. Not without outside help.”

Maruki nodded. “If you don’t mind me asking, is there something that makes you uncomfortable about taking medication?”

“On the one hand,” Akechi began. “It’s a shameful thing. A concession of weakness. At least in my eyes.” And he grinned, sadly. “On the other, asking for it probably makes me sound like a junkie or something, doesn’t it? How many patients have you had come in asking about meds they didn’t need?”

“Actually, while I can’t disclose any personal information about my patients, I find that people rarely ask for something they don’t need,” Maruki shot back, patient and matter-of-fact in his tone. “Even if they don’t actually need medication, or they don’t need the specific medication they’re asking for, I don’t think anybody asks for medication for no reason. Everybody has something they’re trying to solve with it.”

He set his clipboard down and made a motion with his hand. “Say we meet a few more times and we evaluate your issues and we determine that we don’t need any medication in particular to handle your condition, whatever that may be. That doesn’t make your feeling that you may need medication now any less valid. It’s a natural conclusion to having a problem, and a noble thing to request. I, for one, find it brave, admirable, not shameful, and I certainly don’t think you’re asking me about it just to get high.” He chuckled.

Akechi shrugged, silent. The fight was mostly taken out of him at this point. He was just tired. He rubbed one eye with his right hand, forcing himself not to yawn.

“So, if I can summarize,” Maruki began, looking over his notes. “You’re worried about reconnecting with your friends, and you want to work on bettering yourself so you can be a proper friend to them. You’re also concerned that there may be some things with your mental state that are beyond your control, and believe you may need medication to regulate those things. Is that a fair assessment?”

Akechi laughed, cold and humorless. “No,” he said. “That’s not the half of it.” And he grinned, standing from the couch, picking up that Maruki was preparing to end the session. “But it’s a start.”


End file.
